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Politics hurting Vision 2030 projects in some counties

julius muia

Vision 2030 Secretariat director-general Dr Julius Muia. FILE PHOTO | NMG

The Vision 2030 Secretariat is finding it difficult to implement projects in some regions due to differences with county leaders on prioritisation of projects.

The secretariat's director-general Dr Julius Muia said this had seen counties implement projects based on their own strategies that were against the envisioned 2030 flagship projects.

“What we would wish to see is institutionalised planning where politics is totally divorced from our Vision 2030 flagship projects,” he said during a one-day workshop convened by Strathmore University for business journalists.

“As a secretariat, we identified fisheries as a key sector for the Lake Victoria-based counties where all infrastructural development would be geared towards attracting private investment in the fisheries sector.

"But uncoordinated projects currently underway hurts the national good since one county is doing something different from another county denying them the benefit accruing from coordinated plans,” he said.

Yet to provide land

Mr Muia said Mombasa and Kisumu governments were yet to provide land for establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in areas identified as strategic and attractive to foreign investments in the manufacturing sector.

Dr Muia noted that Kajiado, Machakos and Kitui county governments’ support for Konza ‘Smart’ City had helped fast-track its implementation as well as the multi-billion shilling Lamu-South Sudan-Ethiopia project (Lapsset)

The Lapsset project will see an oil pipeline, a railway line and a highway constructed linking landlocked Ethiopia and South Sudan to the Indian Ocean trans-shipment corridor

On its way, the project will see the establishment of 10 new cities, helping open more land for development and easing pressure along the Northern Corridor from Mombasa-Nairobi-Kisumu route.

Benchmarking

"It takes between 4 to 6 years to formulate a policy which includes benchmarking trips and tedious work between government and private sector players to streamline policies that support development. For a county government to ignore this development is to derail national projects,” he said.

"We take time to formulate these policies and any objection to our plans hurts national goals of developing all parts of the country," he said.

He said various projects were identified as suitable for various regions, adding that the Vision 2030 development pillars were apolitical as they were geared towards even development of all regions.